


Rather Prefer Not to Fight Aliens on Saturdays, So Let's Not

by DragonMaster_Shi



Category: Space Boy (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M, Mindscapes, Oliver is super overprotective, fighting an alien is really not a good use of a saturday, kinda angsty but not like, literally just a big "what if", over the top angsty, so they don't fight an alien
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 14:01:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29685060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DragonMaster_Shi/pseuds/DragonMaster_Shi
Summary: Amy climbes the bridge Wander has built in her mind because she has nothing better to do. She really doesn't expect any of what happens next.I hate titles
Relationships: Amy/Oliver (Space Boy)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	Rather Prefer Not to Fight Aliens on Saturdays, So Let's Not

**Author's Note:**

> I hope y'all enjoy this (specifically @Anasten27 on discord because they seem to have high hopes for this one lol)

_ Oh. Here again,  _ Amy thinks. She’s standing on a familiar beach, breathing in the salty air that she shouldn’t be able to taste. Gulls fly above her, cawing as they weave through the rickety bridge constructed by Wanderer. 

“Wanderer? You here?” she questions, her voice echoing hollowly, even in the open space. In her curiosity, still on guard for the Thing she knows could be waiting for her, to make her dreams turn dark. Just to be safe, she decides to climb the makeshift tower. 

As she climbs higher and higher, the sky warps in an odd way into a half-day, half-night shift, the sky mixing beautifully in a sunset between the two. It reminds her vaguely of Oliver’s painting, the moon sharing the sky with the sun in a starry-clear mix. She stares in wonder for a little while, half-wondering why it looks like that, the other half just admiring it. 

She would spend the whole dream-day watching that sunset if she could, and she supposes she  _ could _ , but there’s an uneasy feeling in her stomach that urges her on. 

Her hands are tired, somehow, by the time he can see the end, an unstable platform with a stone archway, a weirdly blurry stretch of just  _ air _ inside it. Blisters are forming on her hands from all the climbing, red abrasions that sting like heck despite her knowing it’s not logical because she’s asleep. 

“Wanderer?” She asks, her voice muted from the fact that she’s in  _ space  _ at this point. There’s no response from the strange creature, and she continues up to the top, feeling the bridgelike structure creak and sink under her weight. 

When she makes it up, finally, she sinks onto the wooden platform, gasping in exhaustion that is more mental than physical. The rough beech wood is a godsend to lay on, oddly comfy for scratchy, relatively fresh logs. 

Once she’s gathered herself enough, she looks to the gate. Up close, she can see the stone is dark, almost obsidian colored, sanded down blocks, silver flecks catching and shining in different places depending on what angle it’s viewed from. The keystone is made of flawless iron, a moon carved in outline into it. The air in between is warped, the colors shining in it, not unlike an oil slick, shining rainbow colors in waves. She tentatively puts the tips of her fingers through the gate, startling when they disappear into nothing. Amy jerks back, startled, and her fingers reappear like nothing happened, tingling weirdly. 

With one tentative step, she goes through the- what she assumes is a portal- arch. 

All of a sudden she’s standing on a floating rock, one of the ones a person would see in a space movie. She scans her surroundings, an asteroid belt circling a huge slab of earth with a securely fortified castle on it. She takes a look at herself, finding that her normal yellow shirt has been exchanged for a cartoon-style spacesuit, complete with a fishbowl-shaped helmet and the teardrop symbol she usually has on her shirt set in the outfit.

“Ah, Amy, you’re here.” Amy turns her head toward the familiar voice, seeing the sharp form of the wanderer standing on one of the asteroid-earth-slab things. She hops down carefully across the slabs to make her way to the Wanderer, coming to stand near them. 

“Where are we?” She asks, wary of the creature beside her but in turn too curious to not ask. 

“Why, I thought you would know! You’re a smart human, you know. But, I suppose”- here they chuckle, a humorless, empty thing that sends a shiver down Amy’s spine- “I suppose humans aren’t all that smart in the first place.” 

Amy huffs indignantly, bit asks again. “What is this place, Wanderer.”

“Oliver’s mind, dear.”  **(I am literally so sorry they sound like Alastor they just do)**

“What????” She nearly shrieks. “I mean I knew what you were trying to do but what?!” 

“I need him for my… plans, one would say. I’m afraid the Oliver you know will soon be gone,” they sigh in a sorrowful voice that Amy, even without her synesthesia, can tell is fake. Their voice is almost dripping with the overly sweet honey of lies, and Amy thinks that if she could taste that like she can flavors, the sickly sweet honey and copper and iodine mix would make her gag.

“You can’t do this! How did you even do it in the first place, for that matter?” Her face is contorted into a snarl of rare, deep hatred, and she stands strong against an entity she knows is much stronger than her. 

“Well, he cares about you, I mean, this is his imagination, after all, all the evidence you need is that spacesuit, really. His subconscious made that for you, and from the detail it’s in it must have taken a lot of design and effort. It was simple, really, he kept himself so guarded that I couldn’t get in by myself. You were a lucky catch, let’s say.”

“We’re not some stupid pawns for you to play with as you please! I refuse to let you use me anymore, and I won’t let you get to him!” Amy fumes, her fists clenching tightly. 

“That’s where you’re wrong. Thanks to you, dear, his defense is weak. You have served your purpose finely, not as a pawn, but perhaps as a knight, instead.”

“You can’t just-”

“Say goodbye to your Oliver, because I’m afraid he won’t be coming back,” they state in a way that makes it obvious they’re not at all ‘afraid’ or even slightly sympathetic towards either of the two.

With that, Wanderer lifts off the ground, hovering in place for a second or two before floating over to the center island. 

Amy runs after him, every step slow and light in the reduced gravity environment. She overshoots one jump, and after a split second of probably unneeded terror, the jet boosters she didn’t even know she had kick in. She flails, trying to gain control of the unfamiliar apparatus she’s now in control of. She somehow manages to get to the central island, crashing unceremoniously into the hard ground. 

“Uuurgg,” she groans, pushing herself up. She’s on the side of the little fortress parallel to the entrance, and she can feel the ground shake beneath her as Wanderer tries to bust open the solidly built wooden door. And she can also hear the sickening crack as they succeed.

“Oh Oliver, what am I going to do,” she murmurs, pressing her forehead to the stone wall, discouraged by the defenses. 

As if in response, the wall disappears beneath her, the stone shifting to form a door-shaped hole that she nearly falls through, stumbling a bit before regaining her footing. She’s surprised but supposes that since this  _ is  _ Oliver’s subconscious after all, that he could kind of do whatever. 

Above her, Amy can see Wanderer trying to go through the tower window, punching their way through a force field and severely denting a metal hydraulic window guard. She runs up to a door leading to the tower, noticing the hefty padlock on the thick wood, and hoping desperately that Oliver will let her in again. Even before she gets to it, her fingers tighten around a metal key, the teeth obviously formed to fit the lock she’s approaching. 

“Thanks,” she mutters, twisting the lock open with surprisingly little effort for something of that size. The stairs shake under her feet from the repeated pounding on the tower, and when there’s a crash, and the grating sound of metal against stone combined with a large crash and a tremor that Amy is pretty sure rocks the entire island slightly. This tremor sends her crashing to the ground, leaving a pulsing sensation in her knee that she knows will bruise later, but regardless she scrambles to her feet, running the last flight of steps fueled by adrenaline and worry.

“I guess… those PT sessions… did pay off…” she pants out, talking to nobody in particular. The door swings open for her easily, and inside she’s greeted with a thick layer of defenses stacked practically on top of each other. Wanderer is looking a bit burnt, having slipped through the gap in what Amy speculates is a laser beam barrier, squished between the red beams and a fence that buzzes with electricity. Amy cautiously reaches out a hand to the lasers, praying that she won’t get burned. It takes her reaching out to realize that she’s back in normal clothes again, the eggshell fabric comfortable and warm on her skin. The lasers flicker out where her fingers are, and she tentatively steps through the space, tiptoeing through it as if that would help increase her safety. The- what Amy assumes is electric- fence curls out in a small opening, like it has been cut with wire cutters. She creeps through it, dodging the tufts of barbed wire dripping with some sort of unsavory looking liquid, something she certainly doesn’t want to come into contact with.

She can see inside to the innermost layer now, a moat of a bubbling acidic substance that looks like it could take the skin off a horse. She shudders at the mental image of that. Inside that is a glass cage, thick and almost plastic-looking in the way it shines. A little bride sets itself up for her over the moat, and although she could jump it, in theory, she is definitely relieved that that isn’t a requirement. The chain fence is now jangling and shaking as well as buzzing from what she assumes is Wanderer attempting to bust through it. The fence can’t be too bad, because when she dares glance back she sees that he’s able to grip onto it firmly with only a moderate amount of constant jolting. She turns back and runs to the glass, the outline of a door forming and she wrenches open the handle, slamming it behind her and watching as the door slips and melds back into the glass in a way that she marks as both unsettling and aesthetically pleasing at the same time. 

Inside the small box of glass are several blankets propped up by kid-size chairs. It’s a fort, that is obvious, but she’s not quite sure what it’s for.

The fort entrance is small, and she doubts she’ll be able to fit through comfortably. Just as she is about to kneel down to crawl through the entrance, the blanket tent seems to grow, and she looks around in confusion for a second, feeling small in her own body. This makes much more sense when she realizes she  _ is _ small. Not as small as she normally is in her dreams, where her hands are tiny and a dress goes down to her knees, but more like around fourth or fifth grade age, hair in curled pigtails and in a yellow dress and white skirt. 

“Hello?” She asks, trying her best to ignore the Wanderer only two layers of defense away.

“Hm?”

Amy pushes apart the folds of the heavy blue blanket, fairy lights, and pillows decorating the messy inside. A boy she knows is Oliver sits in a corner, the impossibly large inside warping time and space itself in a weird mix of items she supposes are important, chairs and dodgeballs and a shell she recognizes from his artwork, amongst other things. The little boy that is Oliver-but-not, someone who seems too small to be the Oliver she knows, the Oliver that protects her and laughs with her and impatiently waits for her attention.  _ This is what Oliver is, I guess. It must be like what Wanderer did, stripping me down to just my little self.  _ A twinge of guilt worms its way into her mind, making her wish that she could have asked Oliver to allow her in such a private part of his central core of  _ himself _ . 

As she crawls closer to him, she notices pictures, like the Polaroids she would see in old movies, hung up on the strings of fairy lights with little clothesline clips.  _ No, not pictures. Memories, _ Amy realizes. Some are simple shots of him and his dad and mom and brother, one of his small fingers tracing the box of the compass for the first time, or of holding a newborn Caleb in his arms, eyes full of stars as he stares at the tiny creature, but all of them are in the first person. The more noticeable ones to Amy are the ones of her, times they were on call or talking together back in South Pines. There’s two, though, that are important to both of them. The first is the view of the art room, the perspective focused partially on Oliver’s hand and partially on Amy, the ginger’s encouraging smile gentle on her face. The second is of the dance, snow falling in front of Amy’s face as she stands outside the school building, eyes welling with tears. 

“Oliver?” She asks, finally reaching him and putting three fingers gently on his shoulder. 

Oliver looks up, staring up at her with wide, round eyes. He looks a lot different than he does as a seventeen-year-old, but the few freckles dotting his cheeks and his messy white hair betray his identity as Oliver, even if he is younger. 

“Amy?” He cocks his head, seeming skeptical of her existence, or maybe it’s just how small she looks as her fifth-grade self. 

“What’s happening? What are you doing here, is it really you?” he asks, voice shaky and a hand gripped tightly around his compass.

“Yeah, it’s me, creepy Wanderer thing is here. I’m like 95% sure we can’t fight it, but we- you, I suppose- need to wake up. I don’t think it can get to you when you’re awake.” This presumption is purely off of a guess, but it’s all she has to go off of, and fighting an all-powerful dream god thing doesn’t sound like a decent use of a Saturday.

“Fair,” he shrugs, and Amy reaches out a hand to pull him up. He grabs her hand, and they stand beside each other. “How do I do that exactly?” He questions. He tentatively pinches himself, then sighs. “I don’t know how I thought that would work.”

There’s a painful sound of shattering glass as Wanderer breaks through the last line of defense, and Oliver grimaces, the way his face crinkles up in anger making it clear that he recognizes the strangely lucid-sounding voice, a monotonous tone that sounds way too calm for someone who intends to take away a child’s conciseness from them forever. 

“Come now, don’t be difficult,” they sneer, stretching their arm through the entrance for far longer than an arm should stretch, giving it the feel of a supernatural horror movie. 

“First things first,  _ you,  _ my dear, need to get out of the picture, I’m afraid.” They reach to pluck Amy from the tent, and she flinches, waiting for claws to grip onto her shirt, chills crawling up her back as she imagines the edges poking into her abdomen like ten tiny needles being pushed into her skin. 

That feeling never comes. When she peeks open her eyes, Oliver is standing in front of her, seventeen again and wearing a hoodie- an outfit Amy has never seen him wear but is in no means opposed to- one arm extended out in a sweeping gesture. She’s her proper age as well, but noticing herself isn’t exactly a top priority when she’s being attacked. 

“Don’t  _ touch her _ ,” he growls, a hand gripped so tightly around Wanderer’s wrist that it punctures their skin. He shouldn’t be able to  _ kneel _ in the fort, let alone stand up, but the fort doesn’t seem to know that. 

“I’m sorry but I cannot allow-”

“You seem to misunderstand me, I said don’t  _ touch her! _ ” The Wanderer propels backward as if hit with a very large blast of air, crashing into the electric fence. 

“Get out of here and don’t try anything again, ever,” he says, eyes sharp with rage. He brings his hand to his chest and brings it out in a sweeping gesture to prove his point, inadvertently sending out some sort of shockwave that knocks Wanderer, and only Wanderer, out of the entire castle and into space. The floor seems to expand under his feet, sending a ripple through the defenses and knitting broken fence links together, fixing shattered glass, and expanding the area. 

“I… I didn’t know I could do that…” he remarks in awe, looking at his hands as if he could see the power buzzing below his skin. 

Amy wraps her arms around him tightly, laughing. “You did it!” She exclaims, and the sudden weight on him makes them both topple to the ground. They’re both laughing, grinning like crazy, and he runs his hand through her hair.

“Amy… Amy…” Quiana shakes Amy’s shoulders, standing on her tiptoes on her own bunk. 

“Wha…?” Amy’s eyes flutter open, the ghost of a touch lingering on her fingers. 

“It’s time for breakfast. PT is canceled for some reason, so you’ve already slept in. 

“Oh. Okay.” She's more awake now, and hazy visions of her dreams come back to her. A blanket fort littered with polaroid pictures, an arch with a moon keystone, and a door. Everything else is hazy. She picks up her glasses, opening her chat with Oliver. 

**Amy:** I had a weird dream last night

**Amy:** it was good I think, but I’m pretty sure it was really weird

**Oliver:** me too I think. It’s weird that I can’t remember, I usually remember my dreams

**Amy:** well, I guess we’ll never know lol

**Oliver:** I guess not 

Oliver laughs, propped up in his bed. He feels warm and content, and he somehow has a feeling it has to do with Amy. But of course, that’s nothing new.


End file.
